


A Black Wood (Whispers)

by speakmefair



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Ableist Language, Academia, Angst, Dreamworlds, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Nightmares, Oxford, Past War, Privilege, Telepathy Sharing, canon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles is delivering a paper at Oxford.  But his dreams (if they really <i>are</i> his dreams) keep interrupting what should be his academic renaissance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Black Wood (Whispers)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luninosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/gifts).



_If you came at night like a broken king,_  
 _If you came by day not knowing what you came for,_  
 _It would be the same..._

 

**Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, December 01, 1963, 10:30pm GMT.**

Charles had forgotten how incredibly dull seminars were. Not only was one forced to sit through interminable papers that had a nasty tendency to only contain one relevant point, but then he, in particular, had to concentrate on blocking out how much everyone wanted to go to sleep/leave the room/go to the pub/kill the speaker in surprisingly uninventive ways.

He had to start somewhere, he had to start in the rarefied, heavy atmosphere of carefully researched minutiae, and he knew it— but God. It was so far from what needed to be done that it was almost laughable.

Endless variations on minor corrections, statements of revolution that were hollow and meaningless, because all that was being overturned was a speck of an atom.

The only illumination came from tiny pinpricks of light in a void of ignorance.

And he could not do anything about it, because he had promised to be careful, he had promised to go slowly, not to attract attention, not to make things worse in a fit of pride and academic pique and sheer frustration at the communal refusal of scientists to see what was in front of them.

Two years before, he would have defended that blindness, explained it, spoken only of how hard it was to conceive of impossibility without personal experience of it as fact, and avoided any more intimate discussion of why that impossibility was so clung to.

Now, though, surrounded by thoughts only he was aware of, he felt no patience at all, because if the presentations were bad, the drinks afterwards were infinitely worse; the Senior Common Room unsuited either to the amount of people present or to anyone who wanted to sit down.

Since he had no choice as to the latter, he was beginning to bitterly resent the former.

He found the third-rate booze, and then a corner, feeling ridiculous and claustrophobic at waist-level but not quite willing to turn tail and flee.

He'd been good at this once, damn it. He'd enjoyed it. 

_"RNA lysis is at the forefront of the current—"_

_"I wonder what his legs look like from the knee down—"_

_"Professor Collins is an arrogant ponce who knows nothing about—"_

_"Polio? Does he have polio? He looks so familiar, did he—"_

_"What a pity. He shouldn't have come all this way in that condition."_

Charles winced, downed the flute of glorified grape juice that passed for champagne, and rubbed his temples with thumb and forefinger. 

He wanted to go home. 

"Charles Xavier? By my foot, it IS you! I thought I saw you on the schedule!"

There was only one person who could have come up with that sort of ridiculous exclamation.

"Professor Cregan," Charles said, not sure if he was more wary or amused. It was generally wiser to keep an equal reserve of both to hand, when it came to Cregan and informal conversation, rather like a bizarre form of fluctuating and pre-prepared mutation. "How nice to see you again."

"I wish it were under better circumstances," Cregan said with a scowl, and Charles was just about to put on his best front of denial, when his professor's thoughts came through loud and clear— 

_Can't stand these bloody things._

Oh. 

Apparently Cregan had not, in fact, registered any change in Charles's circumstances at all, which was, when he thought about it, entirely in keeping with the man's approach to tutoring, as well. His failure to notice his immediate surroundings was so intense that Charles had sometimes considered having him checked out for some new kind of mutation, hitherto undiscovered.

Further case and point: the man's sweater was on backwards. And featured a crookedly-crocheted reindeer. 

Charles chuckled, and was surprised to discover it was effortless, as he reached out to return Cregan's offered hand. 

"Yes, I confess I'm not quite back in the swing of these. I can only hope to feign courteous interest as well as you one day."

Cregan blinked rapidly, pushed his too-thick glasses up his nose, and there. 

There it was, in almost comical simplicity behind the man's eyebrows: _Oh... a wheelchair._

There was a beat of dead air, (an accomplishment, that, such stillness coming forth as the product of a positively frenetic mind), and then Cregan gave a curt, appraising nod. 

"Practice, Charles. All things are possible with a little practice."

And that was it. 

Charles could have hugged him.

"So what brings you here, anyway?" Cregan asked. "I thought you were in... Antarctica, was it? I must say, that's a new one, can't imagine what you were looking at out there, although wasn't there something about frozen prehistoric worms, a while back?"

"Er, possibly," Charles said, a bit lost, "although it was actually America, I'm afraid."

"Oh. Knew it began with an A, not that much difference, though, is there? Frozen north, and all that."

Geography was not only extraordinarily far from being Cregan's strong point, but his grasp of it appeared to have been delivered to him by a very disorientated denizen of Pluto.

"Right," Charles said, deciding abruptly that now was not the time to try and solve Cregan's very peculiar world view. "But, er, not worms. I hope. No, I run a school of my own, now. In Westchester— that's in a rather temperate area of America, or at least, more so than, um, Antarctica, anyway. First formers and younger, right through to A-level standard, well, or whatever it is over there, you know, for the more, ah, _gifted_ students. I'm, um, well, the founder, as it happens. And you know how it is, Cregan, after all. You and Oxford were at great pains to teach me how much published research from any faculty member, let alone the head, adds to the prestige of any institution." As Cregan nodded in rueful acknowledgement, lifting his nearly empty glass, he continued in less minatory tones—"My paper was frightfully dull, though; you didn't miss much."

Cregan smiled at that last, and lounged against the adjacent snack table in a way that made him look like an animate (if rather lazy and slightly drunken) scarecrow. "But that's wonderful, Charles," he said, obviously ignoring the politely-required deprecation of the paper Charles had so dutifully finished with. "Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I always thought you'd make a fine Professor. You'll never be one of these old fossils going through the motions— ah! Cecilia! I forgot to mention, dear boy, you've been replaced!"

Cregan began waving frantically in a random direction. Charles followed the line of interest with his eyes... and if his gaze landed squarely on a pair of implausibly perfect breasts, he certainly wasn't... complaining.

"Cecilia's one of those poor sufferers making up on her labs this year," Cregan said, somehow managing to keep his interest on Charles and ignore the breasts.

_Mutation,_ Charles thought. _It's definitely a mutation. The man is a mutant in every pejorative sense imaginable, and possibly dead as well._

"So I get to keep the Professor's papers in order as a bonus, and keep me in bread and milk at the same time," Cecilia said with a very nice smile and a rather lovely, not-quite-eradicated, American twang. California, most probably, not any of the softer, more distinctive states, and there was no annoyance in her large blue eyes as she finally met Charles's glance upwards from her... assets. Presumably she was used to what got noticed about her first.

"Dating a communist, or some such, so she's got plenty of free time on her hands," Cregan said cheerfully.

"He's not a communist—" Cecilia began, sounding faintly annoyed, and Cregan waved her off.

"Oh, one of those things, you know I don't care for pigeonholes. Rants on about Nuremburg, of all things, that boy, thinks the trials were a mockery, something about a lack of due process and— oh, well, it's over, why should I allow myself annoyance on such a nice evening?" He sighed, and then said, refilling his drink by the simple measure of removing a bottle from a passing tray and then helping himself, before topping off Charles and Cecilia's glasses, "Do you know, I can't understand why anyone would be on Churchill's side these days, I really can't. I don't think even the man himself would be these days, poor old bugger. If he were still alive, that is." 

He looked at Cecilia's beautifully blank face, looked across and a little down from her to Charles's frown, and added with a faint trace of impatience, "Well, honestly! Youth of today, I would have thought you'd been devouring this, what with poor old Kennedy out of it and no-one with half an ounce of decency left to follow him. Another war threatened, more soldiers, and— well." He sighed. "Not to ruin the evening. But yes, before hand, before those trials, I would have agreed with Churchill, for all his old fogery, yes, of course I would have before, and quite right he was too. Going after the soldiers is a crying shame as a principle, but really, I mean, I ask you, Charles, after all that guff about 'only following orders', who could seriously think that bloody mess is or ever was the same as fighting for one's country?"

Charles's mouth went dry. He had been taking in the rest of Cecilia's person, (bobbed red hair— nice eyes— fish, no, fish skeletons— _why?_ — hanging as multi-coloured earrings), and he did not look away now. 

Let her wonder at the crumpled, mangled train wreck that was surely his face, let her see first-hand what true mental devastation looked like, when it occurred

_in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye_

all in one dazzling moment; let her see the visible proof of a long-held certainty's complete eradication; let her watch a crumbling of convictions into powder and dust, Blake's infinity crushed into sand in one flutter of her eyelashes, and all of it done even as Cregan gave an impatient sigh, and dismissed the world as mere folly.

But for Charles, it was not folly. It was realisation and devastation at once, it was all his moral certainties dissolved, it was a new world altogether, and one in which he found himself unexpectedly adrift, knowing now what he had been wilfully blinding himself, deafening himself against.

In his panic, his blind, desperate panic at the beach, he had _forgotten_ — if he had ever truly known, ever really acknowledged even to himself, save as a phrase to be remembered— he had forgotten, if not those words, what they had been used for.

And Erik, of course— and on behalf of that 'of course' Charles would have happily damned all minds and all helmets and all telepathy to the deepest circle of hell and ice and Judas's gnawed head— Erik would have known all too well.

_Oh Christ. What did I—_

"Charles? I say, have you lost that famous tolerance of yours? He's a bit drunk, I think! He'll fit right in with your crowd, Cecilia."

_"What the devil's the matter with him—"_

_"Oh. My. God. Who cares! Drunk, sober, this guy could spend three days out in the rain and he'd still look like James Dean. That's it. I'm going to fuck him."_

That last... 

Thank fucking Christ for that last. 

Charles did a precise imitation of a genuine smirk, and winked at the breasts to shock them all off topic, before looking up and meeting her sparkling eyes. Unshocked, delighted, and intrigued.

His world had spun into decay, and she had noticed nothing, and that, somehow, gave Charles the strength to regain his masks and his barriers, and refind a kind of teasing civility.

"Only an utter fool, Cregan. And you can tell that boyfriend of yours I said so."

"I don't have a—" Cregan stared into the middle distance, looking rarely and genuinely confused. "Do I? No, I'm sure I don't."

"I think he means me," Cecilia said, and didn't quite get her hand to her mouth in time to stifle a laugh.

"You don't make a very _good_ boyfriend," Cregan said suspiciously, and then looked between them. "Oh yes, very funny, amuse yourselves away, children."

It was the last word that did it. Charles bent over laughing, caught between the Scylla of desire and the Charybdis of mirth and the treacherous tides between them that was Cregan's devastating, oblivious clearsightedness.

As if on cue, Cecilia joined him, tilting her head back to expose the true length of her neck and smoothing a manicured hand across the front of her tweed miniskirt in a fantastic, demure deception. When she looked at him again, her cheeks were flushed, and God, all at once. He would have her all at once, he _could_ have her all at once, he knew, her body and mind together opening themselves to him in mingled invitation within her imagination, where he could see her thinking of herself naked, on top of him, all around him; he could almost taste the full panoply of her sudden desire, and it had been. So. Long. 

"You got a swell laugh— what was it, Charles?"

Charles wheeled closer, into her space, and reached out to play with the edge of a charmingly ruffled sleeve. "Tip of the iceberg, darling." 

"An Antarctic iceberg, no doubt. Leaving for certain, now, tah-ra! Oh, lord, and I actually said that, I sound like _my_ old tutor, and I swear he was mummified when I first met him, let alone— ah, goodness me, when did I become so _old_?"

"The day you were born, you're de-aging as we speak," Charles said with a glimmer of real affection for the man who had taught him not to give out all his information at once, to carefully parcel it into small pieces of genuine interest and surround it with promises of something more, something dazzling.

The man who had once told him that what he had to say was interesting, but it needed to wait for a thesis, needed exposition and explanation far greater than one paper could give.

The man who wouldn't have cared if a thousand warheads had hovered above him, because all he would have seen was the miracle of ability, the living proof of what he had found 'too fantastic' all those years ago in an Oxford snug.

Charles had forgotten the miracle. He had been too lost to the sense of defeat.

"And so I am. Cecilia, darling, look me up in ten years." Cregan, still living in blissful ignorance of what he had echoed.

_Long may you remain so,_ Charles thought without bitterness. He seemed to have passed the stage already where he even felt a trace of envy for another's comparative innocence.

He only longed to possess it once more, rewind the clock and the months and the days and the hours, and erase his own aching stupidity.

It throbbed within him, sharper and duller at once than any lust or desire, beating out its own pulse.

He refused to look at it.

"Professor, I'll see you _tomorrow_ ," Cecilia said, half-laughing and half-exasperated.

"Ah yes, the third wheel, I. Enjoy your evening, my dears."

He wandered off to the other side of the room, his last amused thought trailing behind him— 

_Good to know there's some constants in life. Charles and flirting with intent, well, plus ca change..._

And then Cecilia, with an intent that made his own look like waffling by comparison, took a split-second to consider the risk, and then perched on his knees in one smooth motion. 

"Oh, say, I'm not hurting you, am I? It's just strange, looking down at you like that."

_His lips though... I wonder if it still works downstairs... I mean, why flirt with me if it doesn't work, right? What does he get out of it?_

"The answer is nothing," Charles said with some steel, not caring if he confused her. 

"Huh?"

"Never mind. You're not hurting me. And I quite agree... it's awkward. I had a notion to invite you to my rooms, actually. There are proper chairs there, and it's a much more relaxed venue in general."

He touched the small of her back as he said it, and watched the decision get made.

_Hell, even if he doesn't get anything from it, his hands and mouth work just fine, so it's not like I won't. Not like I'm going to turn down fun for me— it's a new age, right?_

"Oh, you have no idea," Charles murmured.

She drove a mini he didn't need help getting into, and wore garters she _did_ need help getting out of, and that, it seemed, was all he needed. That was that. 

Twenty-two minutes later saw them in his musty college guest room, (because even a lot of good money could not bribe the buildings to renovate, unfortunately), and by the time he manoeuvred to the edge of the inhospitable, too-narrow bed, he was overly-grateful for new-wave feminism, because he was definitely too keyed up to have dealt with coy. 

Or worldly pretence.

_Or lies._

"I saw you looking before," she hummed into his ear, and pushed his right hand between the fake-pearl middle buttons of her sweater, as she straddled him with her now-naked thighs. "Go on, touch them."

These words... oh yes. Those were fine. And she was soft, soft and sweet— not figuratively, no, figuratively she was rather shrewd, and in fact, unfaithful, but _literally_. Sweet like only women ever were— 

"Oh-hhh... Charlesss..."

Sweet like he'd almost forgotten.

She was yielding in all the ways he'd come to think of as dull, next to his last lover's intransigence of mind and body

(and that, that above all, that was what suddenly transformed his thoughts into what felt like an unending cry, a plea to some unknown hell or heaven, a wail of mourning or bargaining, his body and mind together made up of and into nothing but yearning, nothing but _ErikErikErik_ , without respite)

the wash of her thoughts as warm and soft as her curves, moving softly and pleasantly to his touch.

Cecilia had no fight in her, no struggle, she embraced what her senses told her. It was heady and drugging, the feel of her against his body and the gentle waves of pleasure of her mind around his.

There was no resistance to her, not in her mind, not in her body, not— anywhere.

Nothing except a deep amused spark, the shifting, melodious line of her intent.

_Wait until I tell the girls I nabbed the biology cripple._

And if he had been hard (which he wasn't. God, not now. Not even a stirring, despite her best efforts, and not because of his own limitations), that would have ruined him for good. 

"Oh... I'm afraid not. No. No, I don't think so." And it came out as a bitter, lengthy sigh. 

"What? What do you mean?"

"You'll get out now," he said, and let the mean pettiness, the sharp unforgiving distaste, bubble to the surface of his tone. "And you'll go home and work on that essay you've made Kristoff already write more than half of, and when he calls you tomorrow to ask how tonight went, you won't be able to help answering 'You should go and get tested for venereal disease'."

Her smile was watery and vacant with easily-constructed peace; even her mind was easy, and she smiled; and nodded; and took the Judas kiss of his mutation, that lingering brush against her memories that could almost have been mistaken for an affectionate brush of his thoughts over hers, as proof of enjoyment.

Charles could have wept for the ease of it and the cruelty of it and the small-minded low-level vengeance of it. 

Oh, poor girl, poor thing, poor unpitiable thing.

He almost stopped there, almost called it _enough_ , and then he thought of that humming, delighted kernel of her enjoyment— 

_Wait until I tell the girls I nabbed the biology cripple._

— and smiled at her instead, and that simply, that quickly, gave her one last easing of her faintly lingering dissatisfaction, made sure that the one last tiny discomfort, of which even she herself was almost wholly unaware, her faint and fading confusion as to what she was doing— as to what _he_ was doing!— had been smoothed away.

"Okay. Goodbye, Charles!"

He couldn't even return her smile.

The door closed on her, on her lovely body and her pliant mind and her painful glee in her own seeming acceptance, closed on what he had sent her to do, because sometimes— sometimes he was unable to be a good man, sometimes he wanted everyone around him to hurt as he could be hurt, and while it was unacceptable and he knew it, it was also, so very much, another, shamefully different, kind of release.

Not as pleasant as the physical kind, of course, but still— release. A surcease, if nothing more.

Charles rubbed his hands over his face, and tried to regroup, tried to think of something, anything, that could give his own mind the ease he had given Cecilia's —

_give me some physic, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!_

Nothing so easy or so simple for him, though, only an unopened bottle of not terribly good scotch in his bedside cabinet. And he decided, quite abruptly, that it was the only kind of oblivion he truly wanted, tonight.

**

_And what you thought you came for_  
 _Is only a shell, a husk of meaning_  
 _From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled_  
 _If at all. Either you had no purpose_  
 _Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured_  
 _And is altered in fulfilment._

 

**St Benet's College, Oxford University, December 02, 1963: 3:30 am**

The unfortunate thing about dreams, Charles had always thought, was that they had words in them. Not words in the way his telepathy allowed him; not in the way that gave him the ability to extract emotions, images, thoughts, feelings, sensations of all kinds and then let him put his own definitions to those extractions; but real words, remembered words, invented words.

_His_ words.

Written words spoken aloud in the voices of others.

_But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope._

Words he had spoken aloud in arrogance and belief and, yes, God, yes, hope, trying to give hope, Christ, what had he been thinking? How could he have been so damned stupid as to give hope to a man who didn't even know he needed it, when all he was ever going to be able to do was take it away again? 

_You're not alone._

Take it away, because belief mattered, belief in _absolutes_ mattered, giving absolutes to _others_ mattered, it had to, it had to, otherwise why— ?

_No, my friend. We do not._

It had been an absolute both times, hadn't it?

_The quicklime burns the legend of the drowned_.

Hadn't it?

Believe me, he had always tried to convey. Believe me, I won't lie, you're not alone, you need friends, _my friend—_

_You did this._

And it had all been true, God help him, it had all been true and what had he _done_?

Because some of it or all of it or, unthinkably, any of it ever should never have been said, he should never have given hope knowing that having sponsored its birth, he could only let it starve and decay, he should never have— 

_A level of despair is reached, where people are willing to die to punish their tormentors._

Shaw and Shaw and goddamned bloody Shaw, and what did peace and his own beliefs have to do with any of it?

_A level of despair is reached—_

_— the painful eagerness of unfed hope—_

Minds in the library, in the students' rooms, throughout the college and the nearby student houses, minds so very human and flickering over texts and ideas and— 

_Take heed of hating me,  
Or taking too much pleasure in the victory— _

He could not even twist his body away from his own thoughts, let alone those of others, and the reading, oh God, the reading, the constant— why must they read and read and discover things he had known for so long for the first time?

Discovery, empathy, knowledge gained all new and fresh and speaking to a hundred separate souls, lighting their minds up with _yes yes this yes this I know this I feel this yes—_

He wanted to wake up. He wanted to wake up.

_where people are willing to die to punish their tormentors—_

He shut down all he could and thought of absolutes, thought of their expression in living form, thought then of enamel, dreamed himself into a display of it, a display he had seen once in a museum; dreamed himself into an exhibition of past glories. 

_Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less—_

He dreamed of the wonder of it, the seeming malleability of it; dreamed of enamel and gold, layered delicately and carefully over iron; iron so delicately wrought it could be filigree. 

He thought half-consciously, even while he made the dreaming continue, of the process of enamelling, careful and integral and intense as words. 

He dreamed himself into a world where there was nothing but glittering beauty over cold truth; dreamt of the pure pleasure that was distraction and pleasure for his mind's eye. 

_Withdraws into its happiness—_

He dreamed it was no more than allegory, that here were his beliefs, set into it like jewels, hard as diamonds, value beyond rubies— 

_Here is the touchstone of my faith—_

and came awake into the cold impermeability of reality, the things that were ineradicable, that nothing could cover, no wrought and golden beauty could disguise, for there was, in the end, no truth in the world he could disguise from his own mind.

_If I really felt that strongly about the beliefs I'm trying to instil in the others, I could have left Shaw's mind at any time and found another way. If I really felt that strongly, I should have done just that._

Enamel, enamelling. Painting over the durable with glamour and glitter and the ease of beauty. 

Covering facts with reasonable words and ideals of forgiveness and hope and a perfection that he knew in his heart he would never see in his lifetime. 

Teaching theories that only made sense if they were based on inalterable facts.

He hadn't been dreaming of that long-ago exhibition and its beauty at all.

_Annihilating all that's made  
To a green thought in a green shade._

Charles slept again, and woke once more, and in his blurred waking reached out and drank more Scotch, and found the tumbler heavy in his hands, a crystal prisming of light and dark and colour.

He turned it, and under his shattering sight it became diamond, glass, quartz, clear and faceted and polished and dull; blue-clear and red-opaque, and it blurred and his mind blurred and he could still hear, still hear— 

_The mind, that ocean where each kind_  
 _Does straight its own resemblance find_

And his mind could still see while his sight swam, and was that his mind, anymore, what was he seeing, what was in those damn crystal facets, what— 

"Merlin's cave," he said, louder than any of his mental wave-chattering. "No. No. I won't look."

_Sorry, sugar,_ purred a voice, _you don't get a choice on that—_ and that was someone else, someone new, no, no, that had been someone new, that had been— 

_Emma—_

_NO!_

And his determination, his attack, his every point of resistance to whatever this might be, was in one swift and yet drawn-long caramel moment pulled aside, and the crystals gleamed and there were so many worlds, so very many worlds, and he knew none of the choices and none of the paths, and he was losing his way— 

_Far other worlds, and other seas—_

— and he fell, and he fell, and it was every colour imagined, it was iridescence, it was time; it was time and it was future past, and it was— and he was— 

"Not that way," Emma's voice trailed around the steel webbing of his mind, it was sweet and soporific and cloying, it hushed and pressed and crushingly leadened his thoughts into immobility, and he fell into something that was not sleep and was very much dream— 

_Annihilating all that's made..._

and his dreams were neither of Marvell's restoration nor his own, but of something darker and more tangled and belonging to a folklore horror, something where roots sent blood up instead of sap in the thicket of a darkened wood, and darkest of all was the laughter he heard within its depths.

_...to a green thought in a green shade._

**

_There are other places_  
 _Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,_  
 _Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—_  
 _But this is the nearest, in place and time,_  
 _Now and in England._

 

**England and nowhere. Never and always.**

The horse's ribs and shoulders bit into his thighs like gnarled tree limbs. Charles leant down and patted its neck, sharing its pain with each plodding step through the falling ash. It was day— he thought— but dark with pollution and flutes of thick smoke, which drew his eyes, beacon-like, across the grim horizon. 

It was nothing, to see the bodies. This above all made him suspect that he was dreaming. Not only were they lifeless, but it was as though there had never been any life in them to begin with, like plastic replicas, unfinished clay, not even the breath-lacking and half anticipatory capture of marble or wood within the bloodless corpses.

There had never been anything that close to life, in this place. Not to be spilled.

So, not the horror of war, then, but its distant painting, long-past remembered words that could hold no terror to someone who had never seen it, walked among and through it. 

Charles was that man, and he knew it.

Oh, of course, he knew what blood was, but for all his reading, the description of a cut still meant more to him than the Iliad's river of gore; far more than its scattered and piled and mutilated bodies; than entrails spilt upon the ground, would ever mean, even in the worst of his mind-held childish fears of what might one day come to life.

_The_ Mari LLwyd _with its red ribbons upon a skeleton horse_

_The whisper from behind the closed door_

_The cupboard opening upon triangulated darkness_

_The silver snakes that writhed in the depths of a mirror—_

Oh, his mind held terrors, and many of them, but they could never come from the blank ash of a wasted battlefield.

"What do we think, old boy?" he murmured to his weary mount, startled by his own voice, and the resonance it still seemed to hold, even in the soft and muffled damp of so much caught silence. "Certainly this can't be your nightmare. It's over, after all, and you're still alive."

He dismounted with a grace he had no right to (horses had been an option, but to dismount them unaided, now, would never be his prerogative), and accepted the beast's nuzzle of thanks. He did not bother to read its mind, was not sure if he even could, but the eyes still fixed him with a hollow, watery gaze and seemed to say— 

_Yes. Alive. But I'm alone._

"You're standing."

And he was.

He stood, as he would never do again, he stood and almost trembled at it, but no; this was memory. He could not stand.

And yet— 

_Here I stand, I can do no other._

"You're standing."

Even the dully obvious nature of the just-heard statement couldn't disguise the voice, falling fast and thick like the ash from behind him, the soft touches of burned flakes caressing its lines and strong lilting inflections, wrapping around them and brushing Charles's skin as they passed him, whispered against him, almost caressed him, as though they were making the voice more friendly with what they had at their soft-dissolving disposal. 

Charles didn't turn around, and instead leaned against his mount's beleaguered side, suddenly feeling just as wasted. The bones and the thin-skinned resolution to carry on were his own, come from his mind to acknowledge him, even as the desolation of his haunted dreamscape called forth an Erik who was not his to reason with.

"I see," the voice said. "It's to be this, then. It's always this. The world you wanted."

There was no answer to that except the one he always gave: that this was the precise, exact, _detailed_ opposite of what he wanted and yet at the same time, he knew, it was the only thing he could ever imagine resulting from the opposition between them.

The only thing they had ever both begotten, the one thing they had not made, but created.

The one thing that was truly theirs, and that would one day come to its dead fruition.

"Not wanted."

"But won't prevent."

It could only be a dream. He had heard those words too often in sleep for it to be anything other. 

The words that had never been said aloud, never even perhaps thought in a form of coherence, but had always lain between them, and always would.

Charles's desire for life, in this wasteland of the soul, led to the heads hanging from Circe's tree, growing only into rot, their ripeness that of deliquescence.

But here in the mud and the grey ash and the thick ache of salted ground, not even the tree of death could find root, and there was no purpose to this worn and patched conversation, where the arguments in his mind took the form of the only man who truly opposed his vision in the waking world.

He had said the words in the halls and pubs and streets of Oxford, in the grounds of the Westchester mansion, in the debris of Hank's long-since repaired lab.

He had said them on the roof of an observatory he had never visited and never would

(or ever could, now, even if it had been brought into fact)

existing as it did only in the mind of a long-dead king, and the brief papers he had left behind him.

_The stairway that rose through the building, the steps that would someday touch the moon, designed to be built wide enough for horses to pull a carriage._

_A stairway to be built for a queen, for Denmark's queen, for a queen who would never be crowned but only loved—_

An observatory of the highest imagination, a stargazer's palace of the mind. 

A fantasy built and never built. 

Renaissance riches of the mind, planned to be brought into reality by Danish silver, hard silver, real silver; the silver that could give credence and concrete actuality to belief— to the belief that was burned up and fuelled by fantasy, by longing.

Belief that was intended as a new kind of crown, to be bound around the king's elflock, a crown that would celebrate and glory the results of single-minded duty.

A new crown and new jewels from the star-laden skies, a different kind of wealth to counteract the riches of the Norwegian mines...

Charles turned his head.

The man on the other horse was not Erik— or rather, it was not Charles's Erik.

(though it had been his voice)

For one thing, he wore the stupid cape (Magneto's eye-catching, eye-demanding generalship; his supremacy on display for all to witness).

It was dirty and tattered but still gaudy-purple, and the helmet was tucked underneath his arm in that half-aware way of something that was never ever truly forgotten. 

But it was not Magneto, either, no more than it was Erik could this ever be Magneto. There was nothing sure in the blue-gray eyes framed in age's fast-working creases, no adamantine certainty.

And he made no move to replace the barrier that had ruined their love, only stood there, holding it like the soldier's helmet it was, the still-lurid colouring of it glowing in the ashen landscape like a general's plume. 

"It's jarring," this miles-staring hybrid of a man said as he too relieved his carrier and jumped to the ground. "Hearing your thoughts like you hear mine. For one thing, you're strange. You're... thinking of Danish kings, at a time like this. There is no moon, even, for your stairs to reach. The sky is black, Charles. _The stars have gone._ "

This last was urgent, and Charles almost backed away, and would have— except he was simply incapable of moving like that, even in this dreamscape where his legs could carry his weight. All he could do was stand in place, and bear whatever this was. "A time like this," he repeated. "A time like what? What am I to do with you? If I'm strange then you're a stranger. And I'm talking to myself now, which is what all dreams entail I suppose, but after the day I had, I'm up for something a little less bleak and a little more..." he thought very loudly of Cecilia's bosom then, and wondered at top volume just what she would have tasted like had she not been a horrible bore. "Venal."

Not-Erik didn't even change expression. Neither annoyance nor humour crossed those remote features, and Charles thought of the man who had stepped out of C.S. Lewis's mind to crave light so intensely that he leapt into the void and to his death.

But that man had felt joy, and the creature his mind had conjured into being would never feel such emotion, let alone move with and toward a passion inspired by it.

And that was the strangest thing of all, for even in the world of dreams, even when what he dragged out from the thorns of his mind was bereft of all logic save the dream's own, he had never before pulled from his thoughts' recesses the idea of Erik like this; Erik made devoid of even hate.

It was as though someone else had built this dream and brought him into it, expectations and all, designed it to tangle the paths he was used to— and then leave him alone with an automaton, a travesty of replication that he had surely never even imagined in the dark moments between dream and waking, had he?

Not even in the moments he hid from even himself as far and as deep as he could.

He could not have done.

And yet here they were, amidst the death of things which had never lived and the woodcut, museum-piece, hide-and-bone horses that didn't live or breathe for themselves, but rather drew movement from a nothingness, an endless craving dark that ached throughout Charles's limbs. 

It burned, almost, this force that held them up, it kept them going; it burned and clawed at his heart with a kind of insatiable hunger. And the hunger, the gnawing dreary pointlessness of it, the ache that would never be soothed or numbed, dug deep and cut at his joints, his limbs, and oh Christ, at his back. 

Every nerve-end he possessed crawled with pain, driving him close enough to screaming himself that they were on the verge of having their own shrieking speech.

"If you start shouting," said the general of this army of broken images, "Use my name."

Charles took a deep shuddering breath, then thought 'sod it,' and reached up to touch the other's face. It felt waxy, and strained across the square, strongly narrow bone structure, but it was still stubble-laced and living and almost warm— and far too real. Not dream-like, not at all.

He bit back any words, any expressions of atavistic horror; he schooled his face into mild acceptance, and managed to say as though it were yet another moment of the teasing folly that they had once generated to spin between them, "And what is your name, hmm?" 

It was a mistake, damn it, touching him was a mistake, whether he be Erik or Magneto, whether he be ghoul or ghost or fatuus ignis; whether he be future or past phantasm that Charles had called upon, he was not to be touched— 

And yet!

It was an indulgence, that was all, a self-indulgence all of his own lucid-dream creation and decision, that drew Charles in, and brought his slightly trembling fingers down the strong sinews of a familiarly intransigent and unbowed neck, brushed them back up to rest briefly behind an ear, and curled them once more, warm and pressing, to the bones of an unfamiliar-familiar skull-curve... 

Erik. 

Magneto. 

Not real, not even alive, maybe, but more than his subconscious had given him in such a long, long time.

"What's your name?" he repeated in a near-whisper.

"I don't know," was the answer, in the frantic, disorientated tones of a year-old beach debacle and nights of sleepless conviction. "I don't know... so say it." 

_Please._

The mud slid beneath him; heated and slid, ate up the blood-water in steam, and Charles gasped, and at his back was a pale horse— 

(and he that rode upon him was Death)

— and the world he stood in now was not of his mind's creation, he knew that now, and Erik was not a man or even a nightmare, but the voice in his head was familiar, and real, and redolent of such pain that it was insupportable by this arid landscape or his mind or indeed anything or anywhere where the existence of words could be borne— 

But they were being born and bourn and borne within his head, and nothing should remain unnamed and unknown, not even this last fragment of the dying star that was, he knew now, his last hope of reconciliation, whether it be with his own mind or the man who stood there, his very own conjured _Nemo_.

(say that no man has killed me!)

"Erik," he forced out, and felt his lips crack as though they had been sewn shut with their own tendons; felt the warmth of blood spill over his chin and coat his teeth as he breathed in; felt his tongue too dry for more, glued with fresh serum and older, darker things to the roof of his mouth, any other words trapped in the hollow cavern behind it.

"Charles," Erik rasped, and when he closed the distance between them, it was not tender, but a violent embrace.

He was _clinging_ , and it _hurt_ , and Charles was still bleeding and broken and he was used up of all use, he was tanned and salted skin over bone, he was like the goddamned horses, and now they were both on their knees, in the muddied, brown-red quagmire ashes of the phantom doomed, and Charles's hands scrabbled at— _ErikErikErik—_ 's back, in a reckless attempt to draw him even closer. 

"Are you real?" he asked the solid shade, watching as the blood on his chin dripped into the hollow of a precisely remembered collarbone. "Erik..."

"I hope not." Erik almost bit the words, his teeth snapping briefly into the matted temple curls that were plastered above his ear. "Do you think it will stop for you, if I wasn't? Sometimes I don't think I'm ever going to stop. The funny thing is, I've wanted to for years."

_Years?_. Even in the logic-absence of a dream's imperturbable continuance, that made no sense. 

They had been here before and never seen it once, the war had gone on forever but had never started, and _there was no time by which to measure its passage_.

"Erik—"

" _Help me._ "

And Charles woke to the thrumming of panic and the lone voice of a desperate undergraduate with an essay deadline in his mind.

_helpmehelpmehelpme_

_icantdothis_

_meanwhilethemindfrompleasureless_

Annihilation in waking.

_a green thought in a green shade_ — 

And oh, how Charles wished he could dissolve as that thought had done.

**

_If you came this way,_  
 _Taking any route, starting from anywhere,_  
 _At any time or at any season,_  
 _It would always be the same: you would have to put off_  
 _Sense and notion._

 

**St Benet's College, Oxford University, December 02, 1963: 5:30 am**

Charles allowed himself five minutes exactly to drift listlessly between wakefulness and sleep. He took five minutes for tears he didn't have to hide, protected from his own shame by the loneliness he had chosen for himself— and five minutes, after all, were more than enough time in which to regulate his breathing from nightmare-quick to usual calm. 

That he chose to focus himself by staring at the now-empty tumbler on his bedside table was not, perhaps, as irrelevant as he might have appeared to a casual observer.

_Emma,_ he thought, his hand closing around the glass, and then —"No," he said aloud. The crystals weren't worlds. They were _her_. Her mind. That is how her mind _looks_. That is _where_ her mind looks. I've been seeing what she sees."

And what she had seen, what she saw, what she was still perhaps seeing, was the empty horror he had just experienced, where even the dead were too bloodless and long-decayed to be truly real.  
An Erik who was not Erik. 

A Magneto born of hell.

Emma's vision.

And Erik's dream.

Charles had become rather good, he had thought, at letting himself bend quietly to annihilation's whims, to let life quietly overflow him, and enjoy or dam its current as necessity commanded.

But when the five minutes, his own moments of grace, were finally up, he was surprised to discover that not only had he made a quite emphatic decision, but that no amount of self-argument about the irrationality of his fear was going to change his mind.

He was going back to Westchester. Back to New York. And then—

Then...

Then he was going to find Erik, despite the helmet and the still barely-functioning facsimile of Cerebro.

And he was going to talk to him in a world that was not made of mud and death and pain, but rather the one they lived in, where there was pain, yes, but not of the nightmare variety; where there was grief, and blame, oh yes, but nothing that could not be borne, or indeed borne _away_ ; and where there was no allegory, but only truth.

_Wait for me, my friend._

_Wait for me, and listen to me._

_Hear me._

_Please._

_**Erik. ******_

**

_And last, the rending pain of re-enactment_  
 _Of all that you have done, and been; the shame_  
 _Of motives late revealed, and the awareness_  
 _Of things ill done and done to others' harm_  
 _Which once you took for exercise of virtue._

 

**Great Falls, Virginia, December 06, 1963, 6:35 pm EST**

Snow had fallen thick and fast here, more so than it had ever done in Oxford, and it muffled and blinded in the same way as it always did, and yet, Charles knew, Erik had heard him, Erik had not stopped his arrival, Erik was standing outside in the snow as the cab drove up and waiting for him, and Erik had heard him.

Erik had heard him.

Erik must have heard him, even though the first thing he said, after Charles had endured what felt like weeks, not just a couple of days of aching, unpleasant travel; after days of snow-breathing and ash-dreaming and wondering when reality would finish with him and send him howling into a void, hurl him back into that wasteland where the emptiness would abhor and disdain him utterly; where it would no longer caress him like apology or mirth or longing; no longer brush over his thoughts and his fears and his emotions like silken promises, but instead draw further back; back until there was nothing that offered consolation, no sound, no touch, no memory, but only the stillness and silence of expected rejection; after all that, the first thing Erik said was— 

"Charles, in heaven's name, what are you doing here?"

But the first thing Erik had _done_ , the first thing this man who prided himself on his deeds being and outer and certain demonstration of who and what he was had _done_ , was to kneel down in front of Charles, a gesture seemingly become automatic to him, and without imparting with it any sense of giving way, or acquiescence, or pity; he had knelt down so that he could look into Charles's eyes, and for that, Charles knew, if he had ever needed a prompt as to why he still loved this hopelessly intransigent man, he had received that prompt, and he felt that love.

"This is my home," Charles said, rather than explain, and buried his face in the crook of Erik's neck and shoulder, and Erik, helmet-free and snow-melting, shut his eyes then, because along with the words and the layers beneath the literal, Charles knew what he was giving him: knew that an onslaught of images and impressions that were not Erik's own danced across his frontal lobe— 

_Longing and a chessboard— pale fingers fondling a black bishop in the dim light—_

_The harsh scald and salt of tears..._

_so customary now,_ Charles heard in reply to that image _like the stars—_

He didn't stop, or relent, but he didn't question or press for details or answers that Erik might not be able to give, either. He didn't ask, but instead sent more, sent love, sent memory that did not scald or scour, but only _was_ ; that merely _existed_ , and for him— 

_me/you/us/this/this was/Erikrememberrememberplease_

He sent 

_good and bad and familiar and strange—_

He sent 

_Sean's shrieks as he fell for the first time, fell off the satellite because he was pushed—_

He sent 

_Erik's own canine, mischievous grin reflected back at him through a lens that flattered—_

He sent then more and less, both at once, sent images and emotions together, sent— 

his own clumsy fumblings with Cecilia, his thoughts even then of _tweed and shame and dishonesty_ and _ErikErikErik_ and _Oxford isn't home any more where can I go what can I do/ meanwhile the mind from pleasure less/ green thought green shade/ I want to go home, I need home, I need—_

"This is my home," Charles said, miles away from any building that could ever lay claim to that particularly sweeping pronunciation, "and I belong here."

_You belong here,_ he thought fiercely, and he did not mean Great Falls, or the snowy path.

And he could hear Erik's thoughts now, too, hear him working his way out of _impossible_ and into _this/here now/I have to_ ; could hear him thinking that this wasn't one of Charles's odd sentimental freaks, this was something Charles couldn't stop himself from thinking, and _this was not my fault—_

— oh, no, it was so very far from Erik's fault, it was something Charles had delighted in discovering, and he could actually _feel_ the moment when Erik finally understood that, and that, that almost sublime moment of comprehension was a delight so strong that even Charles could feel it; even second-hand he could feel it, almost as if it were his own to feel (and perhaps it was). 

How very strong it was, that unexpected release of emotion, of comprehension; how very strong, even though it was tinged with the misery of thinking it was unwanted, unneeded. 

_This is Charles at his limit,_ Erik was thinking, painfully loudly; was thinking beneath that, _I never wanted/ Tell me it's not my fault, even if everything else is, tell me not this, no, not this, tell me it's not me who has undone him like this—_

Charles saw himself through Erik's eyes, a man undone by exhaustion and shock and worry, a man whom it was utterly impossible to turn away, even if Erik knew he should, even if it was so very much the _right thing_ to try and do.

It was a foothold, a handhold, a faint softening of the mortar, and Charles dug the nails he still had at his use, the nails of sharp mind and strong heart and adamant knowledge, he dug everything he knew he could still command, all into that small yielding.

"It _was_ you I heard in Oxford, wasn't it," Charles said against his skin, breathing the words against the small curve of ear and skull, the familiar lines his hands had traced in the dream. "I thought—"

"The dreams," Erik said, but he still held Charles close. "Yes. That. I— the helmet became unreliable. Emma— she promised, but I never have trusted her, you know I couldn't— it was only that I assumed— I never imagined she would, or could, or would _dare_ —" A flash of the old vehemence there, the old arrogance and sense of superiority, and Charles rejoiced in it. Had _missed_ it, he realised, startled by himself, and almost laughed, though not from amusement. "I'm sorry you had to hear, to feel, I kept telling myself it was just paranoid imaginings, but you would say, you would do—"

"She sent them on to me," Charles realized, and almost laughed. "My God, Erik, haven't you thought yet? Emma _literally_ brought us together!"

"You— she— but that! No! That's not— not possible, why— no!" And then, more quietly, "But then, who else would..."

And somehow, that made sense, that it would be Emma's involvement Erik was shocked by— because the existence of monsters had never surprised him, the fact that nightmares and thoughts and fears could be shared and doubled and jointly despaired over was part of the reason he had put the helmet on in the first place; his decision then a protection and guard _against_ such a happening.

Such a happening as this.

Charles had once said he knew everything about Erik, and he knew Erik had believed him— that there was also something that _neither_ of them had known had therefore been relatively easy for Erik to accept, and easy for him to acknowledge as well, and probably with relief. 

But that Emma, ice-and-diamond Emma, would risk her own safety for someone else— yes, _there_ lay the difficulty, the knowledge that in some entirely unexpected way, Erik and Charles had _both_ underestimated someone. 

Charles, ever the scientist at heart, coming upon an unknown variable that defied logic, _of course_ that would be what Erik, who distrusted as he breathed, would have focused on, in that false equation of mistrust and trust. Science and Charles and Erik's own failings, and— 

"I don't know how grateful I am. To her. I don't think I'm grateful at all." 

Erik had said it before he could think, Charles knew, but then... Erik had meant it for over a year, after all, and this burning, unhappy resentment of Emma's skills and her sometimes frightening onslaughts of perception was nothing new.

"She should have let me die..." 

Miserable. Maudlin. Ridiculous.

And Charles said so, aloud and in his mind, dopplering his anger and his frustration and his intent, and got back only that sense of the ashed wasteland and the heavy broken despair of the mired battlefield, and worse than any of that— 

_True. True. True._

"Look at you... look at what I did... what I've done... look at us... at all of this..."

"No," Charles said, and told Erik what he should have done months ago, even weeks or days or _hours_ ago. "You didn't do this, Erik. You didn't fire the gun. I should never have said that you— when you— you didn't even— no. You _didn't do this_. Because you never wanted it to happen."

Erik choked at that, on something that sounded worse even than grief. "Ah, Charles. You're still a fucking ridiculous sophist and I don't know what to say to you." 

Charles listened to what Erik _wasn't_ saying with his voice, after that.

_I love you... I love you I love you I'm sorry—_

_I'm going to die anyway, it's something I need, it's something I know is inevitable, I have to be who— what— what I've made myself into, what I have to do and be, Charles, you mustn't know why, you can't know why, you can't know how what you said—_

_**My friend we are not** _

_I lost you for it so how can I not live up to what I promised others—_

_But I'm going to die knowing that I love you. That was the plan— that's the plan— so leave... do what I say for once—_

"You have legitimately awful plans, and they have the worst track record I've ever encountered, so please shut up," was all Charles said. "You aren't going to die, and obviously I'm not leaving. Your idea of conversation is terrible."

"Then come here."

_Then kiss me._

"You're a tautology all on and of your own," Charles said in exasperation that was only partly feigned, and his kiss was horribly suited to promoting immobility, a dry brush of closed lips that held nothing whatsoever of desire in it.

It was intolerable.

It was a lake mirage in a desert, crueller than arid, cracked doom for the reminder of what it had been— 

"I'm sorry!" Charles gasped, and drew back as far as he could within the chair's confines. Drew back his mind, drew back everything he could, even his fingers, curling them away and under and _backbackbackno_ as though he could protect Erik from their demands if he only found a kind of invisibility within his mental and physical shrinking.

"I don't care," Erik snapped, and he didn't, dear God, he didn't, because the one thing Charles definitely wasn't feeling from him was any sort of variation on pity. He was visibly furious, and probably with both of them, but there was absolutely no trace in his blazing eyes of anything approaching a state where he felt sorry for Charles.

"And don't you dare, Charles, don't you _dare_ , not ever, not so long as you live, kiss me like that again."

Charles only looked at him, smiling even while he felt the idiotic tears begin to sting and pool in his eyes again, and Erik was still on his knees, and his hands were still gripping Charles's wrists, and he said brokenly,

"You said— once— that there was good. If you ever found any in me, then Charles. Please. I'll abide by your damned conditions, I'll still try and argue you out of them when they 're stupid, but I'll abide by them. I can't change what I'm afraid of, I can't change what I want, but you said, you said—"

He faltered to a stop, and bent his head onto their joined hands, and Charles, bound by his chair and unfettered in his mind, knew he had the more freedom, out of the two of them— and he lowered his own head, and put his mouth to Erik's ear, and whispered into that curve that his dreaming hands had traced so many times— 

"Between rage and serenity, Erik, there is another path, I was right. But I've learned that for myself, now, I don't just believe in it, I _know_ it's true. I've learned where I think it is. And we can walk it, you and I. But I don't think either of us can do it alone."

He pressed his lips, then, over the soft shell of hearing that must feel to Erik, after that simple reiteration of a promise which now, here, at last, he fully understood the meaning of, as though he had opened a wound; he pressed his lips down soft and close and warm, and murmured,

"I came home to you. Will you come back with me?"

And waited, and didn't look into Erik's mind; only waited, and waited, until Erik was all control, and all capability, and all decision, and knew it was worth the wait when he raised his head, and looked up, and the answer was clear in those storm-grey eyes before ever he said, almost like a breath of laughter— 

"Yes."

And this smile, _this_ understanding, _this_ acceptance, Charles knew, they could _both_ see.

And both feel.

And could both, for once, believe in.

 

_We shall not cease from exploration_  
 _And the end of all our exploring_  
 _Will be to arrive where we started_  
 _And know the place for the first time._


End file.
